Monday, September 15, 2014

Review : The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman

"It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of
books you were at least halfway home.”

--Lev Grossman, from The
Magician’s LandUnless you’ve been caught in
in an enchanted sleep for the past several years (or just don’t pay attention
to book news at all, I suppose) you’ve heard of The Magicians trilogy by Lev
Grossman. “Harry Potter for adults,” it’s been called, as well as both a deconstruction
of and loving homage to The Chronicles of Narnia and other classic works of
genre fantasy. It’s achieved widespread critical acclaim and popular success.
It’s also received the most polarized reviews I’ve ever seen on Amazon and
GoodReads. Grossman’s series is a collision of literary tropes with genre
fantasy tropes, all told with snarky verve and crackling Whedon-esque dialogue.
Some people can’t stand these books. I love them.I LOVE them.I finally finished reading
the last installment of the series, “The Magician’s Land,” this weekend. And it
was the first time that I’ve ever deliberately slowed my reading, turning back
to re-savor passages just to put off the inevitable end. “The Magician’s Land”
is a beautiful work, a grand and optimistic and true ending. Taken altogether, the Magicians books trace the
satisfying character arc of Quentin Coldwater, a character who started off as a
self-absorbed, bitter, confused and often unlikeable teen, and who matures,
finally, into a thoroughly decent, functioning adult human.That might not sound like
much to some people. But it’s a lot.

Behind all the playful jokes
and flights of fancy, the humor and zillions of hip, pop-culture references,
The Magicians trilogy is telling a profoundly serious story, and it’s doing it
with the forms and language of fantasy. How does a person grow up in our
contemporary world? How do we find meaning, how do we confront and move past
trauma (because we all have trauma); how do we learn to look past ourselves and
care for others, how do we deal with the inevitable disappointments and
setbacks of life; how do we come to accept our own limitations, to be
resilient, and to survive without bitterness?How do we grow up? How do we stay grown-up?In the first book, The
Magicians, Quentin Coldwater and his friends are far from grownup, even after
they’ve graduated from Brakebills, their Ivy-League college for magicians. They
drink, do drugs, and hurt each other. They’re all adrift. They’re all
good-looking, brilliant, rich (thanks to a generous stipend provided to
Brakebills graduates), and they’re freaking gifted magicians. But they’re also all damaged people, and magic can’t fix
that. Even traveling to the magical land of Fillory, the Narnia stand-in which
is the land of Quentin’s dreams, a world which he first discovered in the pages
of a children’s book and which he had thought just a story—even Fillory can’t
make Quentin happy. And Fillory turns out to be far more brutal and dangerous
than children’s literature suggested.By the second book, “The
Magician King,” Quentin is beginning to mature and take on responsibility. At
that book’s end, he takes responsibility for what happened to his old friend,
Julia (even though it wasn’t all his fault) and he sacrifices himself for her.
As a result of that sacrifice, he loses what he thought he loved best—Fillory itself,
the magical land of which he become king.The last book brings us
full circle. Having lost seemingly everything, Quentin returns to Brakebills and
take up teaching. He soon loses that job, too. But even at the seeming bottom
of his life, there’s a new calmness in Quentin. He’s grown through loss, and
the incessant nattering in his head—the endless doubt and over-analysis and
self-recrimination—has quieted. It’s like the difference in Hamlet when he
comes back from his sea voyage and battle with pirates. The endless self-doubt
is gone. We don’t actually see the moment of change, but we can see that it’s
happened. Quentin (like Hamlet) still has more trials and fighting ahead, but there’s
a new acceptance, and even serenity, in him. This time, the reader can see that
Quentin is actually one resilient bastard.As are the other
characters of this book. Everyone is growing up in the last book, and now we
get to hear their stories. Eliot has a couple hilarious chapters. For the first
time we hear Janet’s story. She is one angry,
broken person, and for the first time we glimpse what has made her that
way. We also get to see her live out a thoroughly satisfying badass revenge
story which also happens to be heartbreaking.As the series continues,
the books widen in scope and complexity. The first book featured only Quentin’s
voice, but the second alternated chapters with Julia, the bitter girl on the outskirts
of magic, who had to fight and claw her way to the magical knowledge that was
handed straight to Quentin. The third book features so many viewpoints that it
can be hard to keep up. A compelling new character, Plum, is introduced. Old
characters come back.And this final volume of
the Magicians trilogy is fun. Have I
forgotten to make that clear? There’s some heavy stuff, yes, but for sheer
blessed fun this volume tops all the others. Quentin and Plum turn themselves
into blue whales—just for the heck of it! There’s a crime heist with a
thrilling flying magic carpet ride. There’s a tender, affecting love story.
Grossman lets his imagination fly, and the physical descriptions of Fillory get
even stranger and more beautiful as the land nears its seeming end. And near
the end of the book, there’s a sharp turn into sheer horror, a cat-and-mouse
through a haunted house that had me reading wide-eyed and breathless, thoroughly freaked out.There’s an apocalyptic final
battle and the fate of Fillory hangs in the balance. . . but it was never about
Fillory, not at all. Some readers have complained about how thin the world of Fillory
felt in the first two books, how it’s just a jokey Narnia pastiche. Despite the
increasingly detailed wonders, it still feels a little thin at the end. But
Fillory was never really important, not for itself. It was only ever important
for what it meant to the characters we’ve come to love. The battle isn’t for an
epic fantasy land of dwarves and pegasi and hippogriffs and giants. In the end,
this is about the single, individual battles for a human’s soul.This book is also a
reminder, and demonstration, of what fantasy literature can do. In a recent
op-ed piece in the New York Times, Lev Grossman wrote this:“For me fantasy isn’t
about escaping reality, it’s about re-encountering the challenges of the real
world, but externalized and transformed.”That’s what he’s accomplished in The Magicians trilogy.
There’s a scene at the end that encapsulates it all for me. After all he’s been
through, Quentin is reminded of the little boy he once was, who read a series
of fantasy novels about an imaginary world and fell in love with them. He’s
spent the rest of his life dealing with the fallout of that love, trying to
come to terms with fact that the imaginary world he read about is nothing like
Earth, nothing even like the real Fillory that he eventually encountered and
came to rule. The Magician’s trilogy can be read as a critique of that love, of
all of us who have ever gone through the wardrobe and wished to never ever come
back. But at the end of the Magician’s Land, Quentin does a surprising thing:
he is able to symbolically integrate his innocent, child-like love for Fillory
with his new adult life that now moves past Fillory. It’s a beautiful moment
that couldn’t be conveyed other than
with the fantastical images employed. It’s an example of how an author can use
the tools of fantasy, its armamentarium of literal symbols, to achieve an
effect that no realist author can.And it’s a moment that affirms what reading does. People,
especially fantasy geeks, often use reading as an escape. And it can serve as
an amazing, miraculous escape—the best one I’ve ever known. But when done
wisely, it can also bring us home.